I view groups of Go stones as creatures, and when these creatures step out of line, they often cannot be reasoned with. To become good at Go, as I know it, one must be able to accurately judge whether chasing the awry creature results in a tasty dinner or not.

The struggles on the board are delightful. Yet Go knowledge is fleeting. When I study Go, I am reminded of a passage from an old book that I enjoyed greatly, The Custer Wolf.

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For in dealing with so remarkable a creature, who knows tomorrow's established fact from today's apparent hyperbole?

I have been playing on and off for 15+ years and I float somewhere within the muddy area that is shodan. I have been very lucky to know many wonderful people through Go. I've had teachers and rivals. Come to think of it, I still have rivals.

I am passionate about Go, and I try to make things interesting. Welcome to my study journal and thought repository, and thank you very much in advance for any feedback you are willing to share.

My goals are: Share my successes with regard to systematic and deliberate L&D practice. As I work through and complete books, I'll post about them here. Post my serious games that I have spent time self-reviewing to share with the community here and ask for advice. Share exciting thoughts and news from my perspective as a Go player living in the New York City area (for now). Reconstruct bad thought processes that affect me while playing through deliberate practice and feedback. Reach 4 dan upon which I will purchase a set of slate and shell stones which I have always wanted for use on my beautiful goban.

Recently, over the past month, I've rediscovered my passion for Go. The epiphany came at once, and I wasn't expecting it. To quote from a recent conversation with a friend on their disappointment with progress vs effort, specifically when compared to the success of their parent:

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When you live under the shadow of someone else, it's easy to lose interest in the game. The following is my personal opinion about this topic.

I think you need to step back and ask yourself one solid question. When I pick up that stone and put it on the board, am I playing the Go that I know and that I've learned through a culmination of my knowledge and effort, or am I parroting that which has been told to me by my father?

We have many teachers in our lives, but none of them can take credit for our full growth. Our full growth comes from a culmination of all things - experience, excitement, friends, family, and hard personal effort.

I've learned to accept my Go, with its strengths and its limitations, and embrace the excitement that they bring to this game that can only be played with two people. Only then can we enjoy Go and the study of Go - this thing that we can do with our minds - again.

A lack of a higher Dan rank is not a sign of weakness - everyone's brain is different.

Game 1A couple of days ago, I played a 3 dan at my local club in a serious game with relaxed time constraints. As is common with my Go, I find myself experimenting with new ideas. I have very little experience with many of the shapes that appeared in this game and it was very exciting.

I think the game serves as a good first post because it highlights my weaknesses as a player. I play moves I can't yet fully read out as a matter of fighting spirit. I back off and sometimes don't see the obvious. I have trouble with the natural flow that occurs in the opening. I likely overplay... a lot.

Thanks for the nomination wessanenoctupus! I'm going to start by building a wall.---Game 2Yesterday, I played the resident 5d at the local club today with a 3 stone handicap. Time settings were fairly relaxed. We briefly reviewed the game afterward and he gave me a number of pointers which I am including in the below game record. I am also going to post a few diagrams where I am unsure where I should have played. These weren't really covered during the review.

Game 3It takes me about an hour to get to go club these days. I catch the train at 6:22pm and arrive at the club in Manhattan at 7:30pm. I end up getting home at around 12:20am.

On the way home, I decided to stop at the local deli and purchase an avocado for the morning. While there, I had a friendly chat with the owner and he introduced me to this large circular spindle-held hunk of cheese called Queso Cotija (Cotija cheese). Given a sprinkle of salt, it was pretty tasty.

In this game, I played black against someone I hadn't seen in a long time. He is a 4d-5d known for his tricks and fast and accurate reading. He always intimidates me, but I appreciate when I have a chance to get a lesson from him.

Black 16 and 18 in the game are good plays, breaking White's shape. However you seem to have lost sight of the normal play in the corner where Black simply captures White's cutting stones with 4 liberties to 3.

This was waiting in the corner for a long time, so Black was stronger than you seemed to think. Particularly when you played 42 and White cut you (1 and 2 below). You should have played the atari from the other side at 3 and then captured the corner. White can not break out. Because Black has the series of peeps at "a" points, The White upper side stones are almost captured.

@ez4u - you are most certainly right about the fact that I lost sight of the normal play in the corner there. It might have been pressure from the faster than normal pace or just a mistaken quick judgment, but either way I did not even stop to think about whether or not B could capture W's corner stones and this impacted my middle game decisions. That these corner stones could be captured remained a blind spot for me even when I was looking back at the game afterward. I'll definitely be sure to look into whether it's possible to escape with these two stones in the future!

There are some really great YouTube content creators out there. Many of these channels are spearheaded by strong amateurs with a passion for teaching; four that come to mind are the channels of Dwyrin (aka Battousai), Andrew Jackson, xhu98, and Nick Sibicky. Many times, these channel owners will arrange for a professional review of their own game or otherwise share insights gained through training with professionals. I just happened to watch one of these lectures last night.

In it, Myungwan Kim 9P reviewed a game between two 5 dan players. You can view it on Dwyrin's channel >>here<< if you have an hour to spare.

I have always been a fan of Mr. Kim's teaching. I can't do it justice here, but I can summarize some helpful insights I gained through watching this video.

--Amateur players have trouble abandoning their plan once it goes sour. Learning to always be flexible is a hugely important skill and one that all professionals have developed. --As a Dan player, the difference between a 5d and a 7d player can be something as simple as being able to see an empty triangle as a good move during a fight stemming from a crosscut. Such fights often tip the scale of the game by 15, 30, or even 50 points. --Counting and making decisions based on the result of your count; this is what separates the weak from the strong. --On a related note, if you are winning on the board, there's no reason to actively try to complicate the game. In fact, if you are winning you should actively try to keep the game simple.

I wanted to include this specific video in my post here because I can see my progress being bottlenecked by such problems. I hope to take these lessons with me into the future.

Naturally, it isn't likely that us amateurs will be able to think like a Go Professional. The talent, skill, and time investment just isn't there. Still, we live in an interesting age where there is an almost bottomless reservoir of unique material that we can use to try to bridge that gap. I am grateful to live in an age where professionals largely just want Go to become more popular and are willing to try to raise the level of skill not only to a specific subset of people but rather to everyone.

I'll close with this. Listening to a game review (or reading one) by a strong professional with clear language is one way to better understand Go, but there are other interesting options. Another way to train oneself to think like a professional is to listen to a professional think while playing. For this, there's Hajin Lee's channel >>here<<. I'll be sure to post about this in the future.

@Fedya - Another way to look at it would be: "Only abandon your plans after confirming that they have indeed gone sour." You have to develop a nose (tongue?) for this sort of thing.

Thanks for commenting!

------Game 4 - My trick play worked!I played a fun game at club a few days ago against a visiting 3 dan; it was our first game together. My goal is to reach 3d by the next US Go Congress with credentials to prove it so that I can enter the US Open as a 3dan. I directed this energy against him and we had an exciting game together.

Afterward, we were both lucky in that a strong 6d (confirmed by who he regularly beats in the club) was around and willing to help look at our game. I didn't know him, so when he started watching our stumbling review I jokingly called him our sensei and questioned him on various moves. I hadn't a clue he was 6d until after the review ended. I tried to guess his rank from his comments and guessed 4d-5d; pretty close!

This weekend, I traveled out of state for a wedding. It was a good opportunity to seek out go players! I found one.

We hadn't played a serious game in a long while, so I suggested that he let me give him an 8 stone handicap and bet $5 on it. I was all in.

Sadly, the clock's speaker did not work for W and we annulled the result, but it was an exciting game nonetheless. Eight handicap stones is a lot; I'm fully expecting to lose my $5 the next time we play.

SDK and DDK players may find the variations contained in this game interesting, and of course, I always welcome feedback on how I played with W.

Hi everyone. It's been awhile since I posted here and that is due to a couple of reasons. The most significant of which is my time investment in Biochemistry. The similarity between Go and DNA, for example, is quite striking. In Go, we have two colors (black and white) that form intricate shapes. If one stone is out of place, function is lost for that region of the board and one loses. With DNA, there are four colors (adenine, thymine, cytosine, guanine). The order in which these four colors is played determines the overall purpose, and certain sequences of moves (genes) could be considered joseki, while others are not. In addition, some sequences of moves do not accomplish anything. Luckily, we have processes in our cells that fix our DNA when a color is out of place. Is it an Undo button?

In any case, these days all I can really think about are DNA and Go.

I've been fortunate enough to have access to a friend's computer system with CrazyStone installed. CrazyStone, paired with the python script written by the kind person on this forum whose name escapes me, can be used to lay out move-by-move analysis into a SGF file. I've been running my recent games through it to good effect. Some of the feedback makes immediate sense, while some of it makes no sense at all. For the variations that do not make sense, I have the computer play itself for a bit while I observe and frantically scribble notes. Here's an example game.

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